A large variety of Free BSD Documentation is available for FreeBSD.

What is FreeBSD?

FreeBSD is an open source UNIX operating system. It’s been around for long time and still has a very active development and user community. Now days many servers run on BSD, Apple’s famous IOS/OSX operating systems have their roots from BSD.

FreeBSD has similarities with Linux, and two major differences in scope and licensing. FreeBSD maintains an operating system, i.e. the project delivers device drivers, kernel, user land and documentation, a simply opposed to Linux delivering a kernel and drivers only and relying on third parties for system software. FreeBSD source code is generally released under a permissive BSD license as opposed to the copy left GPL.

Origin of FreeBSD

A FreeBSD project had its genesis in the early of 1993, the original goal was to produce an intermediate snapshot of 386BSd in order to fix a number of problems with it that patch kit mechanism just was not capable of solving. The working title for the project was 386BSD 0.5 Interim in reference of that fact.

The FreeBSD Development Model

The development of freebsd documentation is a very flexible and open process, being literally built from the contributions of thousands of people around the world, as can be seen from the list of contributors. Free BSD’s development infrastructure allows these thousands of contributors to collaborate over the internet.

FreeBSD Project Goals

The Goals of the FreeBSD project are to provide software that may be used for any purpose and without Strings attached. Some of them have a significant investment in the code and could certainly not mind a little financial compensation now and then, but they are definitely not prepared to insist on it. The foremost mission is to provide code to any and all corners, and for whatever purpose, so that the code gets the widest possible use and provides the widest possible benefit.

Features of FreeBSD

Networking- FreeBSD’s TCP/IP stack is based on 4.2BSd implementation of TCP/IP which greatly contributed to the widespread adoption for these protocols. FreeBSD also supports IPX and Apple Talk protocols were imported from the Open BSD project accordingly.

Storage- FreeBSD has many features related to storage. Snapshots allow reliable backup of a live file system. FreeBSD provides two frameworks for data

encryption: Geli and GBDE.

Security Purpose- FreeBSD provides several security-related features including access control lists.

Portability- FreeBSD has been ported to a variety of processor architectures.

FreeBSD’s Kernel

FreeBSD’s kernel provides support for some essential tasks such as communication, booting, managing processes and file systems. FreeBSD has a monolithic Kernel, with modular design. Various parts of Kernel such as drivers are designed as modules. Kernel threading was introduced in FreeBSD 5.0, using an M: N threading model. This model is hard to implement and few operating systems support it.

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